'After Midnight' is about the jazz, not the history

NEW YORK — At the Cotton Club, the famed nighterie on the corner of 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue, the house band between 1927 and 1931 was the Duke Ellington Orchestra. The Duke was followed by Cab Calloway. Unbowed — heck, ignited — by Prohibition, the Cotton Club featured the likes of Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson on its bills. All singing and dancing for white people only. Officially, at least.

The Cotton Club was a complex joint — at once a legendary showcase; an inarguably crucial manufacturer of African-American stars; and an egregious exploiter typifying the sins of appropriation.

"After Midnight," the new Broadway show, began as collaboration between City Center's Encores! and Jazz at Lincoln Center, among others. The resulting show, which opened here Sunday night under choreographer Warren Carlyle's direction, features dazzling talent, some 30 classic numbers (mostly associated with Ellington and Calloway) from "Zaz Zuh Zaz" to "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," and the considerable pleasures of listening to the Jazz at Lincoln Center All-Stars, the real stars of this show.

But this is, to say the least, a very loose conceptualization that could easily have celebrated an astonishing historical moment and offered up an unabashed good time without ignoring the racial issues in play. Those issues are so brushed aside, they feel here like the elephant in the cupboard. Although Dule Hill, a perfectly adequate singer and engaging presence, is on hand to proffer the Hughes narrative, and the Cotton Club stage is evoked, it's never clear whether we're watching an official performance or some after-hours knees-up or something more amorphous. At the end of the show, confusion reigned when the All-Stars played after the bows. Most people leave during the traditional Broadway playoff but this was no ordinary band and that needed to be recognized, structurally.

The show argues that a particular fixed reality is not the point — the music is the music, the talent is the talent, the tradition is a great tradition that deserves preservation. To a point, that's all true. But context still is important. What these performers did at the official show was not the same as what they did for each other. At the Cotton Club, the line between pure self-expression and the expectations of the venue and its audience was shifting and complicated. But you know it was on the mind of every dancer, singer and musician who sang their for their supper and who, as they looked out on that sea of white faces, must surely have wondered whether they were part of the greatest and most liberated show on Earth or a giant act of pretending for the man.

You have the sense that the show, which currently stars the red-hot Fantasia, did not want to be seen as a historic re-creation, and indeed, the traps there are self-evident. For many of us, hearing the fabulous Adriane Lenox belting out "Go Back Where You Stayed Last Night" is better than any clever Broadway conceit. And the notion of fusing old school and new school certainly has an effect of enlivening the former and rooting the latter.

Still, that does not alleviate the nagging sense here that this could have been a good deal more, had Carlyle led his cast down some of the riskier roads, which may mostly have meant letting us see a little of the air between the venue and its loyal artists, leaders of a great entertainment empire who could not even invite their colleagues to come and see their show.